Manage submitted ideas in Aha! Ideas
Ideas give your customers a voice. If you have a lot of ideas to review — congratulations! Your customers are committed to your strategic vision and have given you an opportunity to empathize with their needs.
You can capture ideas through ideas portals (submit-only, private or public), by integrations (Salesforce or Zendesk), by email, or by import. Once you have gathered ideas, it is time to prioritize them and discuss them with your customers.
Note: This article discusses functionality that is included in Ideas Advanced. Please contact us if you would like a live demo or would like to try using it in your account. (Roadmaps accounts created before October 20, 2020 include this functionality.)
Click any of the following links to skip ahead:
Ensure information is complete
Start with a quick review of new ideas from the Ideas → Overview page to determine if you need more information. 
Click on an idea link to open its record drawer. If you need more information, you can comment on the idea publicly and everyone who has voted on the idea will be notified and can respond back. If you want to collaborate with just your team, comment privately on an idea so non-Aha! users will not be notified.
Change the idea creator
You can change the name of the person who initially submitted an idea to your ideas portal. This is helpful in situations where the idea may have been verbally communicated by one person but submitted to your ideas portal by another. Simply open the ideas record drawer and then select a creator from the list of users.
Manage proxy votes (Advanced)
Just as you can submit an idea on behalf of a customer, you can also vote on behalf of a customer. Proxy votes, available for Ideas Advanced users in private ideas portals, allow you to gather feedback from organizations and customers without inviting them to an internal portal.
You can report on proxy votes and filter by their associated organization to get a clear picture of where an organization's interests lie.
Merge duplicate ideas
As you review ideas, you will likely come across duplicates — multiple people with the same idea. When you merge these duplicates into one idea, you reduce redundancy in your ideas list and you gather all subscribers into one Aha! record. As you comment on or ship the idea, everyone interested will be notified.
Merging ideas creates a "primary" idea and this primary is visible in the public and private portals. If you have several duplicate ideas to choose from, pick the one that best captures the value of the concept and merge all other ideas to it using the More options button. Subscribers to the child ideas will become subscribers to the primary so they will receive comments and updates.
Child ideas will not be visible in public or private portals but none of their information disappears after the merge. The idea creators will still be able to view their ideas using the My ideas filter in the ideas portal. Their ideas will include a Merged tag, a link to the primary idea, and will display the idea status of the primary idea. Internally, you will still be able to see all child ideas as linked records to the primary idea so you have more detail if you need it.
When you report on ideas you can choose to show or hide the merged/child ideas, as needed. An idea table filter option Idea merged is available for reports and provides you with three different filtering options to show merged, show non-merged, or show all ideas.
Configure ideas
In addition to merging an idea, you can use an idea's More options button to further configure it or the idea record type:
Merge idea will merge one idea with another.
Link to another record to create a record link.
History shows you an audit log of changes made to the idea.
Add custom field adds a custom field to the ideas form layout. You can also create custom fields in Settings ⚙️ → Account → Custom fields but this option lets you add a custom field without leaving the page and lose context.
Edit custom field layout pulls up the ideas form layout, which lets you add, remove, or rearrange existing custom fields. Again, you could edit your idea's layout in Settings ⚙️ → Account → Custom layouts, but this option lets you edit your ideas form layout without leaving the idea itself.
Copy idea copies the idea, including to-dos and to-do assignees (but without to-do due dates).
Delete idea deletes the idea.
Prioritize ideas
Sometimes you review an idea and know right away that it is something special. Other ideas aren't immediately clear winners and should be prioritized using the Aha! scorecard, informed in part by how many of your customers have voted for and interacted with the idea. Within an idea's record drawer, then its Votes tab, you can see how many votes and subscribers a feature has.
You can also build a list report and add columns for the number of comments, votes, and subscribers to sort, filter, and compare ideas. Use the Ideas → Chart view to visualize and compare your ideas to each other. Use the Change view type dropdown on either page to switch between the views while retaining any filters you have added.
Note: Filters you add yourself will transfer to a new view. Page filters — filters associated with the original view that cannot be removed — will not appear on the new view.
Respond publicly to users
Responding quickly to ideas with "yes", "no," or "soon" is helpful to the person who submitted the idea and anyone else who is curious about it. But it is also helpful to your team because they clearly communicate and reinforce your positioning and strategic direction, which encourages quality discussion and additional ideas. Create an Admin response to publish your response as a comment in your forum.
Invite users to an empathy session (Advanced)
Empathy sessions, available for Ideas Advanced users, are a way to gather a large group of customers and discuss an idea submitted through your ideas portal.
In empathy sessions, you can automatically invite anyone who voted or commented on the idea, prepare discussion guides ahead of the session, then engage with your customers through a live conversation.
Report on trending ideas
If you are handling a large volume of ideas, it can be tricky to understand which ideas are the most relevant for customers. Aha! allows you to spot trends across idea topics to identify the most popular ideas.
Try one of our trend reports to understand how your ideas and idea categories are performing over time:
Ideas → Related views → Pivot table: Trending ideas
Ideas → Related views → Column chart: Trending idea categories
These two reports offer the ability to see which ideas and idea categories are trending based on the date votes were submitted. This can be a very powerful tool if you want to compare and view recent votes.
These views can also be found in Roadmaps → Overview → Example reports.